Addressable LED Neon Flex Rope Hookup Guide

Introduction

The addressable LED Neon Flex Rope adds cool lighting effects for outdoor and indoor uses including in hallways and stairs, holiday lighting and more! In this hookup guide, you will learn how to connect, power, and control the LED segments with an Arduino.

Required Materials

To follow along with this project tutorial, you will need the following materials. You may not need everything though depending on what you have. Add it to your cart, read through the guide, and adjust the cart as necessary. If you are just looking at powering up the LED neon flex rope and using its demo mode, you will need the following.

Tools

Depending on the application, you may need a soldering iron, solder, and general soldering accessories for a more secure connection. Otherwise, the following tools will suffice for hooking up and testing.

Hardware Overview

The LED Neon Flex Rope uses the UCS1903 chipset and LEDs. The electronics are sealed in a waterproof IP65 silicone housing and diffuses the light emitting from the LEDs.

Pinout

To power or control the LED neon flex rope, you will need to connect to the female bare wire connector. 24V is required to power the LED Neon flex rope using the wire with the red stripe. The center wire is the data pin when using with a microcontroller. The third wire on the other side is for ground.

Below lists a hookup table of the pinout for reference.

LED Neon Flex Rope

Pinout

Vcc (Red Striped)

24V

DAT (Middle)

Data

GND (Side)

Ground

Hardware Hookup w/ Power Only

When powering the LED neon flex rope with only power, it will display a demo. Insert the 3-prong power cable into the 24V power supply. Then make the following connections with using a female DC barrel jack adapter.

24V Power Supply

Female DC Barrel Jack Adapter

LED Neon Flex Rope Pinout

Center Positive

+

Vcc (Red Striped) = 24V

Clear (Middle) = DAT

GND

-

Clear (Side) = GND

Once connected, insert and fasten the adapter to the female bare wire connector into the LED neon flex rope. The setup should look like the image below. Tape was used to insulate the DAT pin since the wire was exposed.

Demo Mode

By connecting only to the power pins, the LED Neon Flex Rope will run a demo mode. This can include the rope cycling colors using different patterns. This can include:

one solid color

pulse and fade

alternating between colors

each segment incrementally lighting up with one color

Hardware Hookup w/ Arduino

Heads up! For a more secure connection make sure to solder the wires and make a custom connection.

For users that want to control the animations or react to input from a sensor, an Arduino microcontroller can be used to control the LED neon flex rope’s segments. For a quick connection, we will use an alligator clip with pigtail and hookup wire.

Connecting to the DAT Pin

For initial testing, we will be using an alligator clip with pigtail to connect the LED Neon flex’s DAT pin to the software defined control pin on the Arduino. Use the alligator clip to clamp on the DAT pin wire and then connect the other end to D5.

Additional Power Supply and GND Reference

Since the recommended input voltage via the barrel jack for the RedBoard is 15V, an additional power supply is required. For the scope of this tutorial, we will use the mini-USB connector on the Arduino to power the control circuit with 5V. A 5V USB port from a computer can be used during testing. A 5V USB wall adapter can be used when powering the Arduino in a project or installation.

Since we are adding an additional power supply, make sure to ground the LED neon flex rope with the control circuit. Strip a piece of wire. Then connect the “-” on the DC barrel jack adapter to the Arduino’s GND pin. Wrap the wires together to make a more secure connection.

Insert Wire to GND for Reference

Screw In GND Wires

Hookup Table

Based on the connections described above, here is a hookup table of the connections.

24V Power Supply

Female DC Barrel Jack Adapter

LED Neon Flex Rope Pinout

Arduino

5V Power Supply

Center Positive

+

Vcc (Red striped) = 24V

5V

5V

Clear (middle wire) = DAT

Pin 5 (or whatever is defined)

GND

-

Clear (side) = GND

GND

GND

The final circuit should look similar to the image below.

Library Overview

Note: This example assumes you are using the latest version of the Arduino IDE on your desktop. If this is your first time using Arduino, please review our tutorial on installing the Arduino IDE. If you have not previously installed an Arduino library, please check out our installation guide.

To control the LED Neon Flex Rope, you could use a 5V Arduino-based microcontroller. You will need to download and install Daniel Garcia’s FastLED library using the library manager. You can also manually install it from the GitHub Repository by downloading the library from the button below.

Parameters

When using the FastLED library, certain parameters need to be adjusted to be compatible with the chipset. When using the FastLED library, the LED_TYPE would be defined as the UCS1903 chipset. There are 16 segments per LED Neon Flex Rope to control so the NUM_LEDs is 16. The COLOR_ORDER is BRG so:

red = blue
green = red
blue = green

Example Code

The FastLED library includes a few examples for a variety of addressable LED chipsets to get started. The following examples will demonstrate how to modify the example to use with the UCS1903 chipset. For more information, check out the FastLED Library’s wiki.

Blink Each Segment

To control all the segments with control, you would need to address each segment in the array with a color. Write code to address each segment defined in the array and reduce the delay between each blink. Or copy and paste the modified blink example in an Arduino sketch. After uploading, you should see each segment blink red.

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